Pro wrestling is the hottest it's ever been, and this Allentown native has a front-row seat

ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Pro wrestling, at its core, is a show of chiseled athletes, larger-than-life characters, rich drama and big matches.

And it's been wowing local audiences for nearly a century, from the old Mealey’s Auditorium to Allen’s Little Palestra, the Fairgrounds’ Agricultural Hall and Lehigh’s Stabler Arena.

But for the first time in a long time, a professional wrestling show dropping into the Lehigh Valley will be brand new to fans when All Elite Wrestling rolls into Allentown’s PPL Center on June 20.

The show not only will be the first ever AEW event in the area, it’s been a date circled on the calendar for months for Allentown native Ian Riccaboni, who’s had a front-row seat to the biggest boom the wrestling industry has experienced in a generation.

The Salisbury Township resident works in pharmaceutical patient services by day, sits on the local school board and — while finishing up his MBA — still finds time to hit the gym, train for a marathon and be a husband and a father.

In his spare time, Riccaboni also is a play-by-play announcer for Ring of Honor, or ROH, a wrestling outfit that got its start just down the Turnpike in Philadelphia and is now considered a sister promotion to AEW.

Both will be heavily featured in Allentown, with live-to-tape episodes of AEW Collision and AEW Rampage (both airing on TNT) and Ring of Honor TV planned.

It means Riccaboni is heavily invested in the event, which could bring the largest crowd for pro wrestling the area has seen in years.

How AEW was born

Riccaboni says it means more that, since their inception, ROH and AEW have been two of the largest wrestling promotions in the world, with AEW second only to World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, in terms of annual revenue.

In April, AEW also was ranked by Forbes as the third most valuable combat sports promotion in the world and has, since its launch in 2019, moved from a fascination as an upstart promotion to a fixture for wrestling faithful.

Maybe it's the nature of the business, which now more than ever shows a real side as it paints complex portraits of its stars and tells their stories as trained and dedicated performers.

It also helps that the AEW roster is teeming with industry veterans like Chris Jericho and Adam Copeland, along with a who’s who of the hottest names in the business today, including Swerve Strickland, [Phillipsburg High School graduate] Orange Cassidy, Adam Cole, Will Ospreay and Konosuke Takeshita.

The stars and their stories are relatable to fans, Riccaboni said, and business permeates so much more than what happens in the arena, which continues to resonate on a global scale.

“For 10 years I've been with Ring of Honor, and our highest highs were some of the biggest of any organization,” he said.

“We sold out Madison Square Garden, working with our partners, New Japan Pro Wrestling, I got to call that event in front of almost 19,000 people. We would go to Japan, we would go to the UK. It was unbelievable. It was a ton of fun. And the key was, we were a distant second, we had international syndication. We were seen as cheap programming, but along the way, we got some incredibly talented wrestlers.”

Ultimately, Riccaboni said, it was a crew with a more expanded vision and a sky’s-the-limit attitude that caused an absolute groundswell in the industry as ROH talent ultimately spun off to create AEW.

“We were getting all these talented wrestlers who were seeing this as a great place to wrestle, and wrestle other great wrestlers and sort of a stepping stone. Why don’t we try to become a destination?”

Riccaboni said “the calculus kind of changed” in 2017 when ROH landed (now current WWE champion) Cody Rhodes, the Hardys and the Young Bucks and “things really started to take off.”

“We really started to get mainstream coverage in Rolling Stone, ESPN, USA Today. And it was wild because suddenly I was thrust into the lead announcer position in 2017 and I’m getting called to talk to folks about, ‘What is Ring of Honor?’

“We began to sell out, you know, we went from 1,000 seat arenas to 2,000 seat arenas and then we had this big event called “All In” and I was the lead voice for that. That’s where I met Excalibur (Marc Letzmann), who is now the lead voice for AEW. And suddenly you start to see things moving around, and suddenly, you know, you start to hear some whispers that there might be this other organization starting up.”

Riccaboni likened the departures of Cody Rhodes, the Young Bucks and talent like Adam Page to “that scene in Fresh Prince where Will Smith is kind of standing there looking around like, ‘Alright, where is everybody?’ as his family moves out of their Bel Air mansion. So Ring of Honor took that hard.”

With AEW starting up and taking off, ROH was left vulnerable heading into the COVID-19 pandemic. With its live touring and biggest stars gone, so too, it seems, was the viability of the organization.

“I just remembered December 2021, thinking it was my last time I was ever going to call wrestling. I was loose and I was just saying things I would have never said on a broadcast again,” Riccaboni said.

“Not curse words or anything vulgar, but kind of acknowledging this might be the end of the road. And thank goodness, but I think it was March 5 or March 10 of 2022 that Tony Kahn bought the company from AEW.

“So now the clear number two, where the gap is much smaller, is AEW to WWE, in terms of international reach, in terms of attendance. But I think our product is the best just in terms of metrics the public can measure.”

'Fans here know and love wrestling'

In talking with Riccaboni, one gets the sense he’s been living in a “pinch me” moment in his dream job sitting ringside and calling matches as one of the biggest fans of the industry.

He speaks with reverence for wrestling’s history in the area, traced back to Orville Brown, the first NWA World Heavyweight Champion, competing in 1938 at Mealey’s Auditorium.

“What’s really neat about Allentown is that a lot of folks know its history with the Fairgrounds, it was kind of the international launching point for the (then) WWF. But even before that, the WWWF made a concerted effort to get here to the Little Palestra and run monthly, sometimes every two weeks, and they catered to the local market.

“So Allentown was always this really interesting place where they took stars that matched the local geography, and got these incredible crowds, these fired up fans and they just knew that Allentown was a great market. This area, from 1977 to 1984 was the home of the WWWF into the WWF.”

Rick Kintzel

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For LehighValleyNews.com

With that saw the rise of names like Superstar Billy Graham, Bob Backlund, Hulk Hogan, Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, The “American Dream” Dusty Rhodes and many more.

“They’re off to the races and there wasn’t any looking back from there,” Riccaboni said, with pro wrestling having a presence in the area year after year, and names woven into the local fabric — from the Nasty Boys, Billy Kidman and Dave Bautista to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

“Dave Bautista trained here at the Wild Samoan Training Center, which was a result of the WWF being here for so long,” Riccaboni said.

“So there’s this rabid fan base who loves wrestling, who would commute to go see Ring of Honor when it started in Philly. So the fans here know and love wrestling. It’s the first time we’ve been here and I never thought that Ring of Honor would have a shot here.

“The rising star power that the AEW folks like the Young Bucks have — you know they have a shoe with Reebok just announced, like who would’ve thought? 10 years ago they famously told their story that they overdrew their bank account by $6 and couldn’t get a hamburger at the airport. Now they’re multimillionaires and have Reebok indoor shoes that are going to be sold worldwide.

“To have that kind of star power come to Allentown is incredible. And the fans here deserve it because they were so faithful every third Tuesday at Ag Hall for almost seven years.

“And to have that tradition kind of start here and the history of fans showing up at the Fairgrounds and at Stabler Arena in Bethlehem, it just really makes me happy that these fans are going to get something as high quality as that.”

Read the full transcript of our interview with Ian HERE.